Inside Orbán’s Plan to Occupy Europe

The Hungarian prime minister is on a mission to overrun Brussels, disrupt the EU, and consolidate his power at home. It just might work.

By Kim Lane Scheppele

August 2024

Every March 15, Hungary celebrates its 1848 democratic revolutionaries who demanded independence from the Habsburg Empire, and every year Prime Minister Viktor Orbán delivers an address to mark the occasion. In this year’s speech, he announced a new campaign for Hungarian independence, this time from the European Union. Unlike in 1848, however, secession is not an option because Hungary punches above its weight internationally by being a member of this exclusive club, and because Hungary gets billions of euros each year from the EU to keep its economy afloat. Orbán’s declaration of independence this year therefore took a different form. “Brussels,” he said, “is not the first empire to cast its gaze on Hungary . . . If we want to defend Hungary’s freedom and sovereignty, we have no other choice but to occupy Brussels.”

Ever since coming to power in 2010, Orbán has had a troubled relationship with the EU. While the EU proclaims itself a union of democracies that value the rule of law, Orbán has undermined the union, democracy, and the rule of law. EU officials expressed concern about this but did little for years, until they finally froze nearly all the funds that Hungary receives from Brussels in late 2022. After the EU started hitting Orbán where it hurts, he faced a threat to his solid grip on power at home as one of his own party faithful broke ranks and created a political movement that has quickly challenged Orbán’s political monopoly. A competitive fighter, Orbán has pushed back by using his turn in the rotating presidency of the Council to publicly disrupt EU unity and to pull Europe in his direction. At the same time, he has used the public fuss generated by his controversial actions since taking over the rotating presidency to distract international attention from his growing political repression at home. Because the EU finds it hard to sustain the political will to rein in its rogue states and because Orbán has captured virtually all key institutions inside Hungary, he has a good chance of winning both rounds of this fight in the long run. He has already rattled the European Union and made life more difficult for his domestic political opposition.

Orbán is a transactional leader for whom money is more important than anything else. Even after the EU stopped financing his regime, citing attacks on judicial independence, massive state-financed corruption, and violations of the rights of asylum seekers and LGBTIQ+ people, Orbán made some cosmetic changes but generally refused to bend. Instead, he has been bludgeoning Brussels with the one tool that all EU member states have: veto power over key policy areas. Orbán has been wielding his veto repeatedly to extort the frozen funds from Brussels rather than make the changes to earn them.

In December 2023, with Orbán’s veto looming, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen released €10.2 billion of the frozen funds on the eve of the crucial vote on Ukrainian accession to the EU, an issue she cares deeply about. The money bought Orbán’s strategic absence from the room during the vote so that the tally was deemed unanimous. The European Parliament has since brought a lawsuit against von der Leyen, claiming that she caved into Orbán’s veto threat by releasing the money without adequate reforms.

Emboldened by his success at trading votes for cash, Orbán has only become more insistent on getting something for himself whenever the EU requires unanimity. He has succeeded in stalling aid to Ukraine by forcing elaborate workarounds to fund the war effort and has caused the EU to abandon the possibility of speaking with one voice on major world crises, most recently with regard to Israel’s war in Gaza and the Venezuelan election.

For Orbán, EU money is existential because it keeps him in power. His ability to dole out EU funds through public contracts to loyal supporters solidifies his rule. So, in his mind, Hungarian independence (that is to say, his room for maneuver) depends on getting the funds flowing again. Hence, occupy Brussels.

A Rising Challenger

Orbán’s call to occupy the European Union and his frequent threats to use Hungary’s veto came as he faced the most serious challenge yet to his rule: a February scandal that had stunned Hungary. The country’s president, Katalin Novák, on the recommendation of then–justice minister Judit Varga, pardoned the head of a Christian orphanage who had been convicted of covering up child sex abuse. The resulting political firestorm consumed the start of the EU election campaign, which Orbán had been determined to dominate. But the blaze was quickly controlled. Both the president and the justice minister, the only two women in the inner circle of Orbán’s Fidesz party, immediately accepted the blame for the decision and resigned. Orbán denied knowing anything about the pardon in advance.

Before the scandal, Péter Magyar was another silent cog in the Orbán political machine. The ex-husband of now ex–justice minister Varga (they divorced in March 2023) had served in Hungary’s permanent representation in Brussels, the delegation representing Hungary at the Council, before returning home to manage state-owned enterprises. But when Novák and Varga resigned, shielding Orbán from blame for the pardon, Magyar suddenly broke publicly with the regime, saying, “I don’t want to be part of a system where the real culprits hide behind women’s skirts.”

Soon, Magyar revealed an old tape recording of Varga explaining over their marital kitchen table how corruption worked inside Orbán’s system. Magyar then bypassed the Orbán-controlled media by turning to Partizán, a YouTube channel that might have been a television station had it been allowed on the air, where he gave a detailed, nearly two-hour-long, livestreamed interview on February 11, explaining from the inside how the regime thrived on corruption and used state-friendly media to cover it up. The interview quickly gained more than two-million views in a country of fewer than ten-million people.

Then Magyar went to the streets, leading demonstrations that swelled to the thousands and ultimately tens of thousands, not just in Budapest but also in provincial towns. In April, he revealed plans to run a party list in the June European elections. Too late to register a new party, Magyar took over a tiny one called Tisza, short for Tisztelet és Szabadság (Respect and Freedom, but also the name of Hungary’s second-largest river which features prominently in nationalist narratives) and quickly cobbled together a list of potential MEPs.

As his biography suggests, Magyar is no liberal. Indeed, he was quite comfortable in Orbán’s orbit as a center-right conservative. Even now, his policy views on many issues are hard to distinguish from Orbán’s. He supports the prime minister’s emphasis on national pride and family values. In sharp contrast with Orbán, however, Magyar supports humanitarian assistance to Ukraine and pledges that Hungary will join the European Public Prosecutors Office to control corruption.  But he’s not always in line with the EU, since he argues, as Orbán does, that the EU’s insistence on making EU funds conditional on observing the rule of law in national politics is an overreach. On the campaign trail, Magyar attacked in equal measure Orbán’s self-serving “mafia state” and the Hungarian left’s cluelessness about the countryside.

Orbán’s minions tried to derail Magyar with kompromat channeled through the loyal press, first alleging that Magyar had terrorized and blackmailed his ex-wife and then that he had assaulted a number of women in a nightclub. But Magyar’s rallies and public appearances nevertheless generated enormous enthusiasm. He had one advantage in June’s poll: The regime’s tried-and-true electoral tactics — Hungary’s national elections have been rigged in Orbán’s favor for years — don’t work in EU elections, which must follow European rules. The allocation of seats to parties must observe strict proportionality within states, giving Orbán’s people few ways to make Magyar’s votes disappear. With an EU-mandated relatively level playing field, Orbán’s reliable system for guaranteeing his overwhelming victories failed.

In the June election, Tisza won about 30 percent of the vote and 7 seats in the European Parliament to Fidesz’s 45 percent and 11 seats. Although Orbán came out ahead, he still had to face the unwelcome reality that a two-month election campaign by a complete unknown could shake his grip on power. That said, Magyar’s support had come mostly from the former opposition parties that competed against him in the European elections while he managed to peel away only a single-digit fraction of Orbán’s base. Nonetheless, the election demonstrated that Orbán was not invincible.

Orbán now has two years to figure out how to handle Magyar’s challenge before the next national election. Already there are rumors that the autocrat is planning to change the national-election rules yet again to ensure a Fidesz victory by creating new election districts in the neighboring states that in past elections have thrown more than 90 percent of their votes to Orbán’s party.

The Road to Occupation

Orbán, undaunted by his disappointing European election results, has pressed ahead with his plan to overtake Brussels. He began on July 1, seizing an opportunity that comes along just once every thirteen-and-a-half years: Hungary’s six-month turn at the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU. The Council serves as the “voice of EU member governments,” because it is where member-state ministers vote on behalf of their states. Presiding over the Council is akin to becoming the president of the upper house of a federal parliament because both the Council and the European Parliament (EP) must agree on new laws in the normal legislative process. The rotating presidency sets the agenda for these meetings and keeps Council business moving, something that requires good-faith diplomacy to help member states come to agreement. The rotating presidency has no formal role in the EU’s foreign policy, but Orbán nonetheless saw an opening.

He began Hungary’s term with a world tour that started with a one-on-one meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv before proceeding to confer with a hat trick of the world’s autocrats: Vladimir Putin in Moscow, Xi Jinping in Beijing, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Washington during the NATO summit. Orbán left the summit early to meet former U.S. president Donald Trump in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, reinforcing his already announced endorsement of Trump’s presidential return. Between the Russia and China trips, Orbán also attended the “informal summit” of the Organization of Turkic States in Azerbaijan, perpetuating the historical fiction of Hungary’s Turkic roots and lending support to Turkey’s claims to Northern Cyprus. Orbán squeezed all this into the first two weeks of Hungary’s rotating presidency. By meeting with these strongmen while being introduced as president of the Council, Orbán at once showcased Hungary on the world stage and taunted the EU.

How could he get away with appearing to represent the EU abroad when the rotating presidency has no foreign-policy mandate? It helped that the start of Hungary’s term coincided with the post–EU elections interregnum, during which Europe’s major institutions — the EP and European Commission (the EU’s executive arm, which includes the high representative for foreign affairs, Europe’s foreign minister) — reorganize and reconstitute themselves with new or reelected members. Even the European Council, where the heads of state and government meet in summits, is in flux because the permanent president of that institution is also a lame duck awaiting a successor. All the EU institutions will resume their normal functions on November 1, but for now they are betwixt and between.

The rotating presidency usually plays a modest role in a landscape dominated by fixed and elected leadership positions. But during the six months after the quinquennial European elections, it is the most stable leadership position in the EU. With the Commission out of commission, the Parliament focused on reorganizing, and the European Council president and foreign-policy chief preparing for handoffs to successors, there is little legislation to move forward and all leadership positions are in lame-duck status except for the rotating presidency. This particular rotating president therefore has plenty of room for mischief and few cops on the beat to police overreaching. This special timing was completely predictable, and it presented an opening for a leader who wanted to occupy the EU. Orbán has been planning for this moment for years. He assigned a team of more than two-hundred Hungarian officials to prepare for the rotating presidency.

Orbán launched Hungary’s term with meaningful symbolism, making the logo of the Hungarian presidency a Rubik’s Cube, the puzzle invented in 1974 by a Hungarian architecture professor. The logo presents three sides of the cube — one with the European logo, another with the Hungarian flag, and the final one bringing the number of visible squares to 27, representing the 27 EU member states and offering a clever image of cooperation. Of course, the symbolic cube, like the real one, could be scrambled at any moment. But contrasting that mostly benign impression, the official slogan of the Hungarian presidency is “Make Europe Great Again,” an uncomfortable echo of Trump’s “Make America Great Again.” With these two choices, Orbán signaled that he would at times participate constructively in European policy initiatives and at others act in defiant solidarity with Europe’s challengers.

As Orbán met with the world’s leading autocrats in the opening salvo of his presidency, Europe fumed. Without clear leadership at the EU level, a collective response was slow to emerge. Finally, lame-duck EU officials in the Commission and European Council accused Orbán of illegitimate freelancing. The Council Legal Service found that Orbán had violated his legal obligation to cooperate sincerely, and Hungary’s permanent representation was chastised at a key Council meeting for breaking the rules. The European Parliament, which customarily allocates time for the rotating presidency to present its agenda at the start of its term, found that it was too busy to accommodate Viktor Orbán, so his inaugural address was postponed until fall.

Faced with this wall of resistance, however, Orbán did not relent. He simply removed the Rubik’s Cube logo from his social-media feeds while meeting foreign heads of state, as his communications team unveiled a frenetic schedule of meetings that the Hungarian government would host to push along the rotating presidency’s priorities. Its website listed more than three-hundred events, including many “informal meetings” occurring at various sites across Hungary. The Commission eventually announced that it would boycott the meetings that Hungary had organized on its home turf, and only send representatives to the official meetings that would take place in Brussels. Many EU member states said they would follow suit and either skip the informal meetings entirely, send only junior ministers (rather than cabinet-level officials), or attend only some of them. Less than a month into the rotating presidency, Orbán had sparked controversy in Europe.

In the European Parliament, Orbán disguised his domestic electoral humiliation by conjuring surprising strength. He faced setbacks at first. Magyar’s Tisza party was welcomed into the European People’s Party (EPP), the center-right group that had once protected Orbán as he built his autocratic state but later threatened to expel him. Orbán’s Fidesz party quit in 2021 before that could happen, and then remained homeless in Brussels. When the EPP emerged as the big winner in this year’s European elections with Tisza on board, Magyar was suddenly the toast of Brussels, having brought his seven MEPs to Orbán’s once-secure home in the European Parliament. Orbán attacked the EPP for adopting Magyar, and then sidled up to the farther-right European Conservative and Reform (ECR) group, now dominated by Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and Orbán’s former staunch ally, Poland’s Law and Justice party. But they rebuffed him.

Pugnacious fighter that he is, Orbán decided to build his own group. Scrounging among the far-right MEPs, whose numbers in the EP are now bigger than ever, Orbán assembled a set of national parties from outside the political mainstream, capped by the dramatic accession of the huge delegation from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, which had dominated the French elections. Within weeks, Orbán was able to announce that he had single-handedly formed the third-largest party in the European Parliament: Patriots for Europe. The group demanded leadership positions both in the EU’s highest offices and in parliamentary committees.

But Orbán’s plan to conquer Europe with his new motley crew generated calls for a cordon sanitaire — that is, a set of political measures designed to prevent cooperation between parties that play by the rules and those that do not. When Ursula von der Leyen, of Germany’s center-right Christian Democratic Union which belongs to the European People’s Party, sought reelection as president of the European Commission, she stopped overtly courting the far right after the centrist parties backing her threatened to withdraw their support unless she honored the cordon sanitaire. She won, over the vociferous objection of the Patriots for Europe. In the European Parliament, the centrist and left parties have enforced their own cordon sanitaire that has allowed the ECR to hold leadership positions but so far kept the Patriots out, earning outrage from Orbán and his allies, who argue that the Parliament has turned its back on the democratic will of the European people.

Hungary’s rotating presidency had followed Belgium’s. The Belgians, attuned to the potential problems Orbán would cause, wrapped up as many pending policy decisions as they could so that Hungary would have little to do. The last action of the Belgian presidency was to issue a “Progress Report on the Future of Europe.” The document offered some recommendations for overcoming one of the bodies’ biggest obstacles: The unanimous vote required in foreign-policy, budget, taxation, social-policy, and other areas. Orbán had frequently used his veto in the Council as a bargaining chip to compel the release of money frozen in response to Hungary’s rule-of-law violations, blocking policies unfavorable to Russia, China, and other EU challengers who are Orbán’s allies. He had thus already become an obstacle to EU decision making, and the Council had to find a way to sideline him.

So the outgoing Belgian rotating presidency proposed that the Council use “constructive abstentions,” in which only negative votes would thwart unanimity while mere abstentions would allow the agenda item to pass. The Belgians also suggested more frequent use of EU treaties’ passarelle clauses, which allow particular decisions to be made as exceptions to general lawmaking rules. The Council Legal Service has its work cut out for it now that the other member states are nearly unanimous in wanting to find ways to circumvent Hungary’s veto and the Belgian presidency’s parting report has provided a roadmap.

Between the cordon sanitaire and the proposed workarounds to Council unanimity, Orbán has not yet overrun Brussels. That said, he has gotten farther than anyone might have expected in only a few short weeks since the European election. Commanding the third-largest parliamentary party, holding the rotating presidency while flaunting the rules, manipulating his Council veto to gain more influence than he otherwise would have (because, after all, the workarounds are not yet in place and remain untested), Orbán should not be underestimated. He may be facing more serious electoral challenges at home than at any other time in his fourteen years of continuous rule. But both in his dealings in Europe and in his maneuvers at home, one should never underestimate his survival skills. After all, his eighteen years in the Hungarian prime minister’s post (including his first stint from 1998 to 2002) means that he has been a member of the European Council longer than anyone else.

When Orbán gave his annual address in July to the Hungarian Fidesz party faithful at their summer camp in Baile Tusnad, Romania, he admitted that the battle for Brussels had not yet been won. “Brussels remains under the occupation of a liberal oligarchy,” he told the loyal crowd. “This also has consequences for us, because . . . [we] belong to the prohibited category. The Patriots for Europe have therefore been prohibited from receiving any positions.” But Orbán laid out a vision of the world in which his country is fast becoming a rising power, both in Brussels and beyond, precisely because Hungary has friendly relations with Russia, China, and a Trump-led America, states not paralyzed by Europe’s obsession with political correctness.

For Europe, Drama, for Hungary, Repression

Orbán was also a chaos agent the last time Hungary held the rotating presidency, in the first half of 2011. Then as now, he used controversy at the EU to disguise a power grab at home. At that time, he created an uproar by displaying in Council headquarters a carpet decorated with an image of “Greater Hungary” — portraying Hungarian borders as they existed before 1920, when Europe’s map was redrawn to Hungary’s detriment and the country saw a substantial loss of territory to its neighbors under the Treaty of Trianon that ended World War I. The “Trianon Trauma” has motivated right-wing Hungarian irredentist politics for more than a century, and Orbán has sided with the nationalists by giving Hungarians in the pre-Trianon territories citizenship and the right to vote in Hungarian elections. Orbán signals whenever he can that he is on the side of recovering the lost territories and peoples, if not by changing international borders, then by pretending that they do not exist. This is why he holds the annual summer camp of his Hungarian party faithful in the part of Romania that had once been Hungarian territory.

While the carpet controversy occupied Europe’s attention back in 2011, Orbán pushed a controversial new constitution through the Hungarian parliament on the votes of only his own party, defended a draconian new media law that crushed media independence, and consolidated control over many of Hungary’s once-independent institutions, including the prosecutor’s office, election commission, state-audit office, ombuds offices, and the authority for selecting and monitoring judges. He also attacked the independence of the Constitutional Court.

Orbán learned from being in the rotating presidency in 2011 that he was in a position to block any sanctions that might otherwise have been forthcoming because of his power grab. He simply never allowed the topic of his autocratic consolidation onto a Council-meeting agenda. As he accelerated dictatorship at home, both the Commission and the European Parliament issued warnings that Hungary was moving in a dangerous direction but, without Council cooperation, their warnings did not result in action.

Now, in 2024, Orbán is at it again. At his Romanian summer camp, he announced a campaign to defend Hungary’s “natural character,” explaining: “This Hungarian grand strategy must not start from ‘Little Hungary’ . . . it must include all areas inhabited by Hungarians, and it must embrace all Hungarians living anywhere in the world.” These will sound like fighting words to Hungary’s neighbors, most of whom are in the EU.

Just as in 2011, Orbán is doing his “peacock dance” on the European stage, using the outrage at his antics there to distract attention from what he is doing at home. While Orbán has been flying high on his world tour, his minions back in Hungary have been threatening what’s left of the political opposition, NGO community, and independent media so that they can threaten Orbán no more.

In December 2023, as part of the run-up to the European elections, Orbán’s obedient parliament created a new Sovereignty Protection Authority (SPA). The SPA has the power to investigate any individual, company, NGO, or political party that purports to influence public opinion while receiving foreign funds. The SPA may publish any information it finds during its probes, regardless of data-protection laws, and if it learns that any Hungarian individual or organization has accepted money from elsewhere, the SPA may remove the heads of those organizations from their posts and recommend individuals for criminal prosecution. Those under investigation have no recourse to any court to contest the accusations until indictments have been issued.

As Péter Magyar’s political campaign turned serious last spring, the SPA announced in April that he was under investigation. In June, the SPA expanded its investigation to include Transparency International Hungary and the Atlatszo investigative-journalism website while raising questions about Telex, Hungary’s independent-news website. While no one has yet been publicly prosecuted for receiving foreign funds, the Hungarian government is clearly mobilizing the SPA to challenge anyone who poses a threat to the regime’s survival. Of course, the threat of investigation by the SPA has a chilling effect on others.

The European Commission launched an infringement action against Hungary in February for creating the SPA in violation of EU law, but has not since treated the issue with the urgency it deserves by expediting the case. The Commission has given Hungary until late August to respond to the allegations that the SPA infringes on the principles of democratic government and violates Europe’s legal guarantee of the free flow of capital. In the meantime, Orbán’s regime is thumbing its nose at the EU by multiplying these investigations.

Orbán also stands to incur European wrath by pushing through the Parliament a new law that overrides some of the changes Hungary made last year that nominally boosted judicial independence to persuade the Commission to unfreeze some of Hungary’s funds. The new law permits the justice ministry to look into the files of any ongoing court case or open prosecutorial investigation to see what is happening inside these allegedly independent institutions, regardless of the suspicions of political interference that this surveillance might produce. Orbán’s friendly public prosecutor’s office has even recently indicted Anna Donáth, an MEP and former president of the opposition Momentum Party, on charges of using violence against a police officer. The charges stem from a 2022 incident in which she and others attempted to peacefully prevent police from arresting an opposition pastor who had gotten under Orbán’s skin. Though video taken of the incident confirms she was not violent, that has not stopped the prosecutor from charging her with a violent crime that carries a sentence of up to eight years. This, too, will have a chilling effect on others who resist Orbán’s tightening grip.

Orbán clearly sees Magyar’s success at the polls and the continued operation of opposition politicians, critical NGOs, and independent media as serious threats that must be neutralized. And having already gotten the EU to unfreeze money it had withheld over violations of judicial independence by making modest changes that had little effect, Orbán can now compromise the judiciary still further. So during the EU interregnum, while he controls the Council agenda and the other EU institutions are distracted, Orbán is further consolidating his power at home, knowing that the EU will do nothing.

Hungary’s strongman is now waging a two-front war. He is bending EU institutions in Brussels to his will while simultaneously countering challenges to his rule at home. Both wars have one goal: to give Orbán the personal freedom to act without constraint. This is his 2024 version of Hungarian independence — the independence to personally do whatever he wants. It is a far cry from the 1848 uprising in the name of independence and democracy that his country celebrates each year.

Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University. She has worked on Hungarian constitutional law since the 1990s and is the author of the 2022 Journal of Democracy essay “How Viktor Orbán Wins.”

Copyright © 2024 National Endowment for Democracy

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